Making Smarter Recruitment Bets to Eliminate Hiring Bias

(The article summarized here first appeared on Employer News, titled “Shortening the odds: time to make smarter recruitment bets?”. Read the full article here. )

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Have you ever considered the similarities between recruiting and poker? (Alt: you’ve never considered the similarities between hiring and poker). Tom Viggers, an Account Director based out of pymetrics’ London office, explains that the two things have a lot more in common than he initially thought, and understanding such commonalities is quite revealing of the probabilistic nature of each—at least as they stand today.

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Hear him out…

Most humans, whether they’re playing poker or hiring their next employee, rely on what are called cognitive short-cuts, or biases, in order to make day-to-day decisions. To illustrate this bias, consider the fear many experience while flying on airplanes versus driving in a car—when you turn on the news, you frequently see plane malfunctions or crashes making headlines, but rarely the hundreds of car accidents occurring on your local highways. This causes individuals to grossly overestimate the danger of flying versus driving, when in reality the latter is much more high-risk.

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Tom rightfully points out that nowhere are these cognitive biases more prevalent or impactful than in the world of recruitment and HR, where mental shortcuts routinely have a bearing on other people’s careers and livelihoods. For example, we know at a rational level that a person’s job history and the experiences they’ve had are not predictive of their success in a role—yet a six-second CV/resume screen is almost always the first-pass filter at the top of the recruitment funnel because, well, that’s just the way it’s always been done.

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At pymetrics, we challenge the status quo and take the guesswork out of hiring with our integrated platform that enables recruiters to eliminate hiring bias and unpredictability from the process. Instead of guessing or whether or not past experiences align best to a new role, why not align the cognitive, emotional, and social attributes of your candidates to your current top performing employees? Time and time again, this has been proven to be the most efficient and fair way to ensure that new hires will succeed and endure in their roles. With our patented set of 12 core games derived from decades of neuroscience research, pymetrics is providing global enterprises with a window into candidates’ true potential like never before. If you’d like to learn more about our award-winning methodology, feel free to check out our Science page here.